AMD Announces Radeon HD 8000 Series “Solar System” for Laptops

On Sunday, SweClockers reported that AMD surprises by announcing new graphics chips in the Radeon HD 8000 series much earlier than expected, but not what is hitherto known as the Sea Islands. Instead, the red team lifts the veil and presents Solar Systems – graphics circuits for laptops.

First out in the Solar Systems family are the Radeon HD 8500M, 8600M, 8700M and 8800M. The first three are confusingly similar to 384 stream processors and support for GDDR5 or DDR3 memory. The only apparent difference is the clock frequencies.

Radeon HD 8800M is the most expensive variant and has 640 computing units in 650-700 MHz and 4.5 GHz GDDR5 memory. This results in a computing power of 992 GFLOPS at “single precision” and 62 GFLOPS “double precision”. AMD does not reveal any more figures than that about the new graphics chips.

The newcomers build, despite hints to the contrary, on the 28-nanometer Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture – the same technology as today’s graphics cards in the 7000 series. This includes a better relationship between performance and power consumption as well as support for a variety of technologies, including DirectX 11.1 (Windows 8), graphics switching with Enduro and more power saving modes.

The introductory models in the Radeon HD 8000M series will be released in the first quarter of next year. It is very possible, if not probable, that one or two newcomers will be included in computers that will be launched at the CES 2013 trade fair in January.

In the second quarter of 2013, more models will be introduced, including replacements for today’s performance variants in the Radeon HD 7900M series.